Succession (2 page)

Everything frightened her when she was four years old. A cluster of shadows at the end of the corridor, light winking off a door handle, the open mouth of a hunted stag on the long picture, and her own footsteps tap-tapping eerily, erratically, on the tiled floor.

She had lost her way. She had somehow become detached from her nurse, and all the corridors and doorways looked the same. She was too small to open any of the great doors. Worst of all, right at the end of the hallway and half hidden in shadow, there was an image of the devil, rising out of a crack in the earth, chewing the limbs of the damned.

And she could only totter towards him, because she didn’t know where else to go.

If she screamed, and no one heard her, the devil would surely hear.

Her dress was heavy and sticky, chafing her beneath the arms, her breathing hoarse and uneven, coming out in ragged whimpers.

She knew already that it was a terrible disgrace to cry, except in penitence.

Finally she banged the flat of her hands against the carved panel of one of the great doors, and to her surprise it moved smoothly away. She stood in the doorway, light streaming towards her from two immense windows so that she could hardly see.

Then she saw his legs in their silk stockings; the long, pointed shoes.

She had hardly seen the duke since coming to live with him as his ward, yet she knew it was him. There was something spread out on the table in front of him and he was bending over it. She could see more clearly now his thinning grey hair, and the powerful nose with spectacles perched unevenly on the end of it. His lips moved as he read.

Some impulse made her step forward; she didn’t know what. She was almost as scared of the duke as of the devil.

He didn’t look up until she had nearly reached the table.

Hello
, he said, his watery blue eyes clearing.
You must be … Margaret?

And when she didn’t answer, he asked if she would like to see a marvellous thing. And when she didn’t answer that, he held his hand out and she walked awkwardly over to him, and then he picked her up and stood her on a chair. He brushed the tears from her face with a quick thumb and told her not to touch.

Do you know what this is?
he asked, and she shook her head.

It was a great map, he told her, a map of the world.

It curled at the corners and he had pressed it down with weights of various kinds: a small box, an ink stand, a wooden head.

The world was all colours; a mass of colours surrounded by blue. Around the edges the twelve faces of the wind blew the sea in all directions and tossed the little boats upon it. He talked her through the countries.

This is France, see, and this is Brittany, and this – this is England, where you live now.

She listened politely, not believing him. How could England be so small? She waited for him to explain the other features of the map: the fire-breathing dragons and salamanders, great snails and griffins and giants, beasts joined together with heads at both ends, and men with ears trailing along the ground.

In the centre of the world there was Jerusalem, of course, bounded by a circle that was God’s holy tower. To the west there was an oval country, where unicorns played. There, he told her, it was possible to find the well of youth, guarded by two-headed geese in the pepper forests of Malabar, where there were trees that grew lambs from giant pods, and wool-bearing hens.

At the top were Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Five rivers spouted from this garden, flowing south and west. If it were possible to sail south on one of these rivers, he said, past the line of the Equator, you would see men who walked upside down on their hands, and rain falling upwards on to the earth.

But she was looking at the margins of the map, which were decorated with feathers and shells, and further up were the sun and moon, representing the firmament, and beyond that, of course, the glory of God. Which some men maintained you could sail to, he said, following her gaze.

She listened carefully, not liking to say that his fingers were digging into her as he held her on the chair. Sunlight shifted into cloud, and there was a spatter of rain at the windows.

He had sailed to some of the countries himself, he told her, and knew for a fact that Ireland was not near Spain.
And yet
, he said, half smiling into her serious face,
there is the world we live in, and the world of the imagination, and who is to say which is the more real?

And now he was smiling not so much at her as at some inward vision.

He released her then, so that she tottered slightly, and he put out one hand to steady her, then began to roll the map up, methodically and swiftly rolling up the known world. She had a sudden dizzying sense of scale: England a small, brown corner of the world and herself a tiny speck on it.

He spoke about his time abroad, especially in France, where he had been captured by a woman wearing armour.

Do not underestimate the strangeness of the world
, he told her. And then he said that this woman, who was known as Jeanne d’Arc, was the bravest woman that ever lived.

And then her nurse had appeared, flustered, anxious, and the duke had lifted her down from the chair, and she had hurried towards her in a stumbling run, back to the known world.

Later, much later, she learned that the world had changed from the flatness of a map into a globe, that it was not bounded by dragons and giants but by a sea of ice at both poles, that Jerusalem was no longer the centre of the world, and that there was a new land to the west, which was bigger than anyone had realized.

She learned also that her guardian had been accused of treason, that he had lost much of the nation’s land in France, and that he had plotted to take the throne by marrying her to his son. For which
crimes he had been sent to the Tower. And upon his release from the Tower he had been murdered on a ship. And the sword that killed him was rusty: it had taken six blows to sever his head. After which his headless body had been thrown upon a beach.

Still, when she thought of him, she remembered that afternoon in his study, the hiss of rain at the windows. He had spoken of a brave woman with deference, she remembered that. And he had unravelled the world for her, bigger, more colourful and stranger than she had ever known.

In this time by means of the forenamed Earl of Suffolk a marriage was concluded between the king and Dame Margaret, the king’s daughter of Sicily and Jerusalem, a woman of exemplary birth and chargeable to this land, for … it was agreed by the king … that he should give over all his right and title in the duchy of Anjou and the earldom of Maine, the which two lordships were in the keep of Normandy. The which conclusion of marriage was the beginning of the loss of France and of much heaviness and sorrow in this land.

Great Chronicle of London

 

She was not beautiful in the English sense, being small and dark, but there was a vivid quality to her, an intense attentiveness. She walked like a dancer; her ribs were lifted, her collar bones open so that her neck seemed long. It took most people some time to realize she was not tall. Her father had given her no dowry, so she walked taller than ever. Seed pearls glistened like tiny teeth in her hair.

The Earl of Suffolk adjusted his body to an attitude of admiration and deference. She was fourteen years old, but it seemed to him that she would require a great deal of deference. As she drew closer he could see the minute contractions and dilations of her pupils, a nerve quivering in the soft upper lip.

‘They will not love me, I think,’ she had said to him once, with that air of certainty that left no room for doubt or hesitation. He had said that of course the people would love her, just as the king
had loved her, from the first. Though, privately, he considered that
love
was an accommodating word, like
beauty.

It was true that the king had felt
a passion fix’t and unconquerable
from first seeing her portrait. The dim miniature which to everyone else had seemed unclear, slightly damaged by its journey, had in the king’s eyes resolved into a composite of everything he yearned for, for himself and the nation. He had attached himself to this vision with that fixity of which he was unexpectedly capable. Amenable to most things, he would from time to time grow obdurate as a stone; there was no reasoning with him, no persuasion. That was why the earl had accepted, on his behalf, this young girl who brought with her no dowry, who had to be bought at the great cost of the territories of Maine and Anjou.

It had been part of his mission to win her confidence, and he had won it. In any company she looked first to him before speaking or taking a decision. Now he smiled encouragingly as she took her place beside him, and although she did not smile back he could see a certain release in the set of her shoulders, the tilt of her head. They stood together while the choirs sang in a soft curtain of light that came through the great windows, and the earl had the sense of being as insubstantial as one of the motes of dust that danced about in its rays.

Then there was the journey to England.

After several hours at sea the clouds gathered out of nowhere; the sky began to brood and churn, and the sea to broil and foam. It twisted like the coils of some monstrous intestine, spewing out extraneous matter from its depths.

The crew, fleetingly illuminated by flashes of light, battled frantically with the sails. Soon the air was nine parts water and it was difficult to breathe. All the passengers were ordered below, where they clung to one another and prayed.

Some said they saw armies marching from the battlements of the sea, while others saw the faces of devils in the waves, and yet others the faces of their saints, to whom they cried out for aid. The first ship
was dashed against hidden rocks but remained afloat, lurching dangerously, with part of its belly gone and some of the crew swept overboard.

One man swore he saw the Son of God walking towards him. In His hand He held a shining cross and His face was smiling. This smiling Jesus came towards him on a wave, and the man tried to cry out to Him, but his mouth was full of the storming sea, and so the Son of God walked past.

Yet he was saved, this man, by the beam of timber from the broken ship to which he clung, though afterwards he always said he had been saved by the smiling Jesus. In later years, when he told this tale, some laughed, while others grew sober and joined in with fantastic tales of their own, and others asked, half mocking, what the Son of God had been smiling about, which was hard to say. Also it was hard to describe the nature of the smile. ‘Was it pitiful?’ they asked him. No. ‘Was it joyous, for He was bringing His flock home?’ No. Nor was it triumphant, nor sad. When they doubted him, because he could not describe the face of his Lord, nor say how he knew for certain that it was Him, he remembered how in childhood he had walked across the rafters of a burnt-out house for a dare. And in a burst of inspiration he said that it was just as if He was right pleased at being able to walk on water again.

And at this several members of his audience withdrew, shaking their heads, and saying that his wits had been addled by the sea.

But the Earl of Suffolk had been charged with the duty of bringing the king’s new wife back to him. Somehow he got her into a tiny boat together with his own wife, Lady Alice, and a boatman who rowed them strenuously towards the shore.

Several people had assembled on the sands, startled by the news that their new queen was landing. No one had expected her to land there, at that point. But the mayor of that town, Porchester, was a man who considered himself equal to any task that the Lord should throw at him, and he ordered carpets to be laid across the beach, and hastily summoned a small band of musicians to play the royal party in. They waited for more than an hour in the rain and wind, while the little boats bobbed restlessly back and forth and the bigger
ships lurched on the horizon. As soon as they drew near enough the mayor commanded his men to run into the water and haul them in.

So the earl at length emerged on to the shore, carrying the crumpled princess, though his legs were unsteady, surprised by the feel of land. His soaked clothes clung to him, his hair was plastered to his head, and he was only recognizable as the earl because of the insignia he wore. He stumbled drunkenly across the carpets, holding what looked like a bundle of rags, so that the mayor and all who stood with him doubted what they saw, and the musicians began to play uncertainly, out of time.

Suffolk could think only of how he had begged the king not to give him this mission. His right arm hurt where he had been battered against the side of the ship, and his ribs felt bruised, so that he carried the princess with some difficulty, but she was too sick to walk and he would not entrust her to anyone else. He concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, and on not dropping his royal charge as he trod unevenly over the carpets. By the time he reached the mayor he had hardly enough breath left to request that they should be taken to a shelter where the princess could lie down. He saw doubt in the eyes of the mayor, so he spoke sharply, and they were conducted to a tiny cottage where the startled occupants offered them what they could. And he carried the princess all the way, though his right arm grew numb in the process. He was too old for this, he thought; he felt every day of his forty-eight years.

When at last he set her down on a wooden pallet with a straw mattress, her face was as white as death and she could only whisper at him in French. He knelt down heavily to hear what she was saying, and found she was enquiring about the other ships, and her attendants, and the storm. He assured her that they were not lost; it was entirely possible that some would be swept up later that day or the next, or further along the coast.

He thought she must have misheard him, for despite his assurances she turned her face away and wept. Gradually he understood that she was weeping for a greater loss.